If you are enjoying your holiday and hoping the next decade is way better than this one....stop reading now and go party. Trust me, this post will be here when you have a nice hangover on January 1st.

For the rest of folk, the Canadian Press, Even as the US economy recovers, a decade of joblessness and flat wages could lie ahead is a real bummer.

The decade ahead could be a brutal one for America's unemployed - and for people with jobs hoping for pay raises.

At best, it could take until the middle of the decade for the nation to generate enough jobs to drive down the unemployment rate to a normal 5 or 6 per cent and keep it there. At worst, that won't happen until much later - perhaps not until the next decade.

The deepest and most enduring recession since the 1930s has battered America's work force.

Yes, not 2010, that's 2011, according to an economic forecast by Goldman Sachs.

On James Pethokoukis Reuter's blog, is Goldman Sachs 2011 forecast would be an absolute disaster for Dems. Contained within are leaked Goldman Sachs economic predictions:

The key features of our 2011 outlook:

1. a strengthening in growth from 2.1% on average in 2010 to 2.4% in 2011, with real GDP rising at an above-potential 3½% pace in late 2011
2. A peaking in unemployment in mid-2011 at about 10.75%
3. extremely low inflation – close to zero on a core basis during 2011
4. a continuation of the Fed’s (near) zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) throughout 2011.

The excellent blog, My Budget 360, has a very interesting and important article today entitled 10 States with Underemployment Rates of 20+ Percent. Manufacturing Sector Employs Same Number of Workers that we did in 1940. It is a hard hitting piece that amplifies concerns raised here on many occasions regarding the ill-effects of globalization. And they have some nice, powerful graphs in support of their arguments.

For instance, on the underemployment issue, consider this data:

One thing that is clear is the employment situation is in a major funk. 10 states now have underemployment rates of over 20 percent. We are talking about Great Depression statistics here:

There is a new Economic Policy Institute report, h/t'ed by Paul Krugman, on the long term negative consequences of recession and unemployment. I have attached the report, A Economic Scarring: The long-term impacts of the recession by John Irons, to this post.

Here are the highlights:

• Educational achievement: Unemployment and income losses can reduce educational achievement by threatening early childhood nutrition; reducing families’ abilities to provide a supportive learning environment (including adequate health care, summer activities, and stable housing); and by forcing a delay or abandonment of college plans.